We'll Put Our Muzzles to the Lake: the passionate inner life of Hubert Jennings

Abstract

This introduction to the life of Hubert Dudley Jennings (1896-1991), one of the first biographers of Fernando Pessoa, includes his early years in England, his experiences in World War I, and his teaching at Durban High School, the same school where Pessoa had studied while in South Africa. This sketch relies in part on A Cracked Record, a memoir consisting of four notebooks penned when Jennings was in his nineties – 697 handwritten pages, revealing a writerly and romantic imagination. A fragmentary fifth instalment of this memoir – a 21-page typescript – is discussed elsewhere in this issue of Pessoa Plural.

Keywords

• Jennings, H. D. (Hubert Dudley)
• World War, 1914-1918
• South African poetry
• Poesia Sul-Africana
• Durban High School
• Durban (South Africa)